Mastery of Hand Strength Paperback – January 15, 2009

I’ve learned a ton from this book and will continue to as I refer back to it. If you’re interested in how to build hands like vices, the. this has you covered. I’ve already built myself a grip tool suggested in this book (mr pinch-o-grip) and started using it.

Over multiple decades of experience at the highest level of competition I can attest this is the single book on the subject you’ll ever need. A must for all serious strength athletes.

I read this book and even made some contraptions which indeed increased my hand strength!I need to re-read it, cause it's like this... When you read it, your motivated all over again.The author is a cool dude. Old school down to earth guy, straight to the point and funny too.. I laughed out loud many times reading the book. This book will motivate you to have the grip of a gorilla crushing anything your hands can grasp.I made some block weights with a 30lb dumbbell and a hack saw and the final product is great.Also made a grip strengthener, with a Softball, drilled a hole in it, took a S-hook screw, hand screwed it in tight, hooked a small chain to it, and ran the chain through a 10 lb weight plate. Very simple, and you hold it till your hand can't grip it anymore.There's more but you have to read it yourself..All in all, 5 stars for sure! Awesome book.

I discovered the author via a number of entertaining videos on Youtube, and with 22 mainly 4 or 5 star reviews I thought this book would be the perfect book on grip strength training. I purchased this book at the same time as two others, and having now read and digested them all, here are my opinions...The positives:1 - The book is written in a friendly, easy to read style2 - There is a hello of a lot of excellent information and training tips packed inside3 - Great anecdotes and tales of grip strength masters4 - Useful photosThe negatives:1 - It is VERY expensive for a Kindle book - I was expecting it to be a lot longer than 100 odd pages2 - The Kindle formatting isn't great - there are a number of paragraphs jarringly formatted to the right, for no reason I can see, and numerous missing capital letters3 - There are a lot of product placements4 - Most of the photos would benefit from being largerThe second title I bought was the hilarously outdated Edward Aston's How to Develop a Powerful Grip - must have been great in the 1930s, but mostly outdated now. Plus it's freely available to download from Google as it's out of copyright now.The final title I purchased was Dale Travis-Amber's Ultimate Grip Strength System: Easy to Follow Hand, Wrist and Forearm Strength Training Exercises to Build a Crushing Handshake and a Strong Grip in Weeks (How To Get Fit Free) for 99c on special offer, and was also very good, and is aimed more at the average guy who was just getting into grip training (so was more suited to me).So overall? John Brookfield's Mastery of Hand Strength is definitely aimed at the seasoned grip enthusiast - who has a bigger budget! I would rate it as 3.5 stars, but as I can't use 1/2 measures, I've been kind and given it 4 stars. The majority of my negatives could easily be corrected, and if that were to happen, it would deserve a 5 star rating.

If you want to know a lot of exercises and a little theory about forearms workouts this is probably the only book you'll need.John Brookfield believes there are essentially 5 muscle groups that must be trained seperately: finger flexors, finger extensors, thumb, forearm and reverse forearm. Those are my words, not his and my assessment. He does not spell it out so clearly, but he does include some nice charts to demonstrate which exercises work which muscle group.He has great insight that no one else has, for example dynamic gripping improves gripping ability while moving. This translates to sports better than simply gripping while standing.

I had a hard time with this... there is some stuff in here that I just couldn't wrap my head around from a training standpoint. It struck me as a little hokey.I'm not saying it isn't or couldn't be effective and great. I'm just saying it wasn't for me.I know that this is somewhat of an "industry standard" so I'm going to return to it and do my best to give it a fair shake.

This book is a great resource for learning about developing balanced grip strength. I have heard of some of the exercises mentioned before(farmers walks, grippers) but there were many moves that were surprising to me(sledgehammers, screwdrivers). Brookfield covers all aspects of grip strength and gives examples of moves to train the attributes. There are atleast 3 or 4 choices for each type of move, so it's fairly easy to implement into your training. Brookfield also suggests different exercises for different types of athletes such as football players, martial artists, gymnasts, etc. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about grip training and developing an amazing grip.

This is the most comprehensive book about hand strength I have ever read and i've only ever read one. I know i won't need another book for the rest of my life. Trained using just a few techniques for a few weeks and I have to recalibrate my handshakes, massages, and squeezes. People have been complaining.